Darn right, Lachlan. Progressives behave as if the collapse of these United States into a single uber-State (destined for UN assimilation) is some foregone conclusion. As though every single velvet handcuff entitlement program is irrevocable. As though liberty has to be devoured by a doomsday machine.Politico:

Govs. Rick Perry in Texas and Rick Scott in Florida have both said they won’t expand Medicaid to more of the working poor in their states — rejecting a central part of the law designed to cover 15 million more Americans.
. . .
The reluctance of other GOP governors suggests they’re not at all sure that rejecting a big infusion of Medicaid cash makes for good policy or good politics. In fact, they’re trying to recast the problem as one that Obama must solve.

If you were so crazy as to take a common sense look at economics, you might naively think that economic effort of citizens bubbles up through states funds the federal government.

Progressives basically admit that the system is broken, and all runs backwards. We don’t budget at all, and haven’t had a balanced budget in recent memory.

Thus, ‘Zimbabwe’ Ben Bernanke is pulling money out the nether end of the Doomsday Machine, creating suction to draw in the states. It is a shameful, dishonest, un-American process. That tarted-up Star Trek image pretty well sums not only this idiotic health care debate, but the November election in general.

And it was Thomas Jefferson, founding Democrat, who wrote our excuse note….

http://twitter.com/KingShamus King Shamus

Best. Star Trek. Reference.

Evah?

http://pointofagun.blogspot.com/ Dave C

I saw the Enterprise and VGER and knew this was Smitty’s post without seeing the heading.

http://thecampofthesaints.org Bob Belvedere

Bravo, Smitty.

rjacobse

That’s not V’ger; that’s the planet-eating doomsday machine. (Don’t think they ever figured out where that one came from.)

Anamika

Hi Smitty,

It looks like smitty the christianist is at war with smitty the rightist. Or perhaps it’s just a kind of intellectual honesty that refuses to bed down with liberals even to support a strongly held socio-religious view.

Or perhaps Smitty the christianist has disappeared. Whatever. As a purely practical point, society functions best when atleast SOME wealth is redistributed, whether via decent health care for all or some other hoopla, because most extreme wealth is not “created,” but sucked from the blood of the less fortunate, and this cannot be sustained indefinitely, any more than environmental pillage can be sustained. Those with a “talent” for accumulating wealth can and do influence (= rig) laws and social mores to provide a multiplier effect maximizing the centralization of wealth, at others’ expense. Thus, any social system that “works” must provide some checks and balances to restrain the wealth-centralizing tendencies of the already rich and the wannabes.

In a way, the desire for (“excess”) wealth is very weird, almost insane. In “real” terms, the ordinary contemporary shlump is wealthier than kings of yore could even dream of. They can drive their own car, watch TV, eat papaya in January, stay cozy in comfortable homes, with indoor plumbing, sanitary water, etc etc, but this kind of wealth is apparently not satisfying. The only kind of wealth that is even superficially satisfying is that which depends on comparison, ie one has to have or at least be able to afford (much) more than most of one’s contemporaries.

It is a competition. Which in the end devolves into taking something from others in order to enrich oneself.

AKA theft. Which is how landowning basically came about. And landowning was the basis of the original system of oppressive wealth, sometimes known as “nobility,” [sic, as if greater “net worth” — also sic — somehow correlated with greater goodness, godliness . . . ]

It seems almost impossible to avoid a kind of circularity in this, since every available “value”-term has been appropriated by the privileged class to confer upon itself more status, as if more people kissing your ass means greater protection from self-hate, or, if you believe that crap they serve up in church, protection from a hellish after-life.

And this is why Jesus (is said to have) said, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.

Ha ha, that was a bit of a ramble. Oh well, whatever, eh? That’s one way to get from here to here.

Once again, I remind you, a stream of conscious is not a substitute for rational discourse.

Tut tut, Anamika! Like alcoholism, cognitive dissonance can be treated only when you acknowledge your addiction. Tut tut!

http://theothermccain.com smitty

Can you state your thesis simply, please?
Faith == sacred.
Politics == profane.
Apparent tension occurs when you conflate the two. Which is what politics frequently attempts.
So, what are you getting at?

Tennwriter

An active gov’t favors the rich…..which is why conservatives favor a limited gov’t..
Income increases happiness up to 50k, and then doesn’t do a whole lot beyond that.So, Anamika, when you face, as you will, Perfect Justice and realize that He quite correctly cannot stand to be in your presence, and neither can you stand to be in His presence, where will you go? Unless you have the Blood of Christ, unless you have undeserved mercy, where will you go from the Presence of the Most High?

Anamika

I’ll consider you advice when you acknowledge your own mistakes first. (for ex. as pointed out here and here.)

Sincerely,
AR

Dave C

Dont remember that episode but I remember ST:TMP

Just not that we’ll, I guess.

Dave C

TL:DR

Other than did you that there was an outbreak of cholera in Cuba? To treat that a person needs Gatorade and rest and the socialist paradise has trouble managing that.

SDN

Considering the socialist paradise can’t manage the 19th century improvements in sanitation and water supply brought by “European colonialism” that prevent cholera outbreaks in places like India in the first place….

Wombat_socho

Not remembering “Star Trek: The Motion Sickness” is a feature, not a bug.

http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

Those Southern Governors are NOT rejecting “free federal cash” to cover poor people. The poor people are already covered by existing Medicaid programs, and that funding isn’t affected.

Joining in the federal “expansion” gets a temporary infusion of cash and a permanent obligation. It’s similar to Clinton’s “100,000 cops on the street” that amounted to many fewer cops on the street for two years, after which the full cost would have to be picked up by the state or locality. It’s a loss leader, a bait and switch scheme to stick the stupid with future costs that will grow exponentially and no way to pay for them.

Notice that none of the Southern states that are rejecting this scam are among the states teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. This move helps explain why they aren’t, and why others are.

http://profiles.yahoo.com/u/EU5DQWQTTHTPO4A4ZYSL3AAV2U Adjoran

Oh, and Politico is a hack leftist propaganda outlet whose founders were all charter members of the Goebbels-esque “Journolist” effort to manage the news to fit the leftist talking points.

Refusing to ever link them was one of Ace’s few wise decisions. (Of course, when most of your decisions involve cheap vodka and horny ewoks, there won’t be an abundance of wise ones).

Al1q

Tut tut, Anamika,tut tut!

You still fail to acknowledge the difference between scale and distribution. Your arithmetic is correct, but your mathematics are seriously in error.

Tut tut, Anamika! This is not for your benefit. Tut tut!

Anamika

What you have been posting suggested right-wing values, criticising
“leftists” and redistribution of wealth and state charity. I kicked
around the idea that you might be just refusing to get cozy with liberals (even
if they supported religious ideas) but then took off into a long ramble against
extreme rightieness, as an impractical basis for a civil society, ending up with
Jesus re scripture and wealth.

Does that make sense?

And yes, religion and politix do get mixed together, usually by the rightist
side, and often enough with cynically manipulative intent. What ever happened
with that story about the Xian right getting angry with and splitting from the
secular right for their allegiance to Ayn Rand, famously an atheist?

Anamika

Re. JeffS

You still fail to acknowledge the difference between scale and distribution.

Why does that question even arise? It’s your assumption that I’m ignorant of the difference between the two. It’s a clear cut strawman, unless you believe that my “98 percentile suggests the kid is 1 in a 50” comment is actually wrong. If so, prove why I’m wrong instead of making statements that show your own ignorance, like the one you made when you took issue about my “ignorance” about Bollywood.

Standard deviation is a topic you brought into the discussion. Of course the samples that fall under SDs from the mean are NOT *distrubuted* evenly. You said, “The ASVAB is graded on the Bell Curve. Ergo, Stacy’s progeny is well to
the right of the median, close to 3 standard deviations out. ”

That too is flat out wrong. 98 percentile is close to (just above) 2 standard deviations (2.054 to be more specific) from the mean, not 3 as you assert .

SD of 3 will give a percentile score of 99.865 and and SD of 4 yields a score of 99.997.

But since ASVAB test scores are givcen in a 99 point *scale*, we don’t have decimals to work with. So a person who gets a score on 98 (like Stacy’s son), could have got anywhere from 98.000 to 98.999, (the Floor of that percentile gives the percentile rank, which is a number between 1 and 99) . His stand deviation from the mean could therefore be anywhere between 2.054 and 2.326. Far from a SD of 3.

I don’t know what the “raw score” for ASVAB test would be, and the standard deviation they use, to get the percentile ranks based on the Guassian *distribution* of those individual score samples. That would be very useful to really understand the difference in actual scores between a person who gets a percentile of 99.8 to one who gets a 99.2.

Instead, the test administrators seem to report only the percentile rank (ona scale of 1 to 99) , which is easy to understand for even a layman.

A score of 98 (percentile NOT percentage or “raw score” ) in ASVAB means that you certainly scored bettter than 98% of people who took the test. Which also implies that you scored less than atleast 1.000% of the people (those wityh a socre of 99).

Assuming 20,000 students took the test, Stacy’s son would have got a rank that could be between 201 and 400. I took the low-end and gave him ‘1 in a 50’, which is a certainity.

You seem to ignore the simplicty of percentiles in test scores and choose to play an expert at statistics and lecture others in Guassian distribution, while making a complete fool of yourself, like you did in the case of bollywood.